Comment by morphle | Hacker News Reader

Comment by morphle | Hacker News Reader

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I didn't know that the colder and denser ocean crust gets it thus is more prone to subduct. Does that also imply the denser crusts subducts deeper towards the earth center or does the colder crust prevent it from going deeper? Or does the angle of friction of ocean crust with the underside of the continental crust dominate the angle of subduction deep into the mantle?

How mindblowing to imagine. We should make a simulation of the entire earth history where you could follow the atoms and molecules from the birth in stars to the forming of the earth and then through forming of continents, erosion, sedimentation, subduction, eruption as lava, etc. etc. Of course we only know a partial history of a fraction of material in these longterm cycles but still, it would be a nice way for our brains to get a moving simulation of all that science learned about the Earth System History. It would beat Google Earth or a planetarium or universe simulator. You could watch the neighbourhood you live in and follow it back in time for as far as we know.

Older ocean crust does indeed generally subduct at a steeper angle! Relatedly, if you have ocean crust that is relatively young and hot enough but is still colliding with continental crust, then you can get "flat-slab" subduction [1]

Once the crust gets deeper in the mantle, eventually metamorphic phase transitions become the most important factor. In some seismic images, it looks like subducted slabs make it all the way to the core-mantle boundary (where they may contribute to the source of new mantle plumes).

For sure, I would love to have that simulation!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_slab_subduction

To create that simulation I would need to team up with scientist who have enough credibility, reputation get the funding for programming that simulation (see my other comments on this thread). My part, the open source code would cost $25K to create. Collection and readying all the geology, all paleontology and part of biology science papers can partially be done with machine learning like Google's scholar search engine until you get a list of all relevant papers that humans must parse to find the timeline and spatial movements of rocks and materials we know about. A nice job for students.

Still, it would be a cheap research project with big science returns like the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field, Dark Energy Survey or Sloan Digital Sky Survey did for cosmology.

Thank you for your answers, I now have a few weeks of science papers to read and follow up on.

> How mindblowing to imagine. We should make a simulation of the entire earth history where you could follow the atoms and molecules from the birth in stars to the forming of the earth and then through forming of continents, erosion, sedimentation, subduction, eruption as lava, etc. etc. Of course we only know a partial history of a fraction of material in these longterm cycles but still, it would be a nice way for our brains to get a moving simulation of all that science learned about the Earth System History. It would beat Google Earth or a planetarium or universe simulator. You could watch the neighbourhood you live in and follow it back in time for as far as we know.

Maybe this is the simulation.

You mean to say that this text that forms a simulation in the reader's brain is that simulation?

I meant our universe is the simulation, but I like that one too.

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